Focusing on the memories of Estonian refugees moving to Sweden in the wake of World War II, I analyze the concepts of “memory space” and history within the framework of the Escape as a master narrative. Following the research participants to the sites of their memories in Estonia and Sweden today, raised the questions what constitutes a lived memory space, and how is history defined within it?

Through a combination of a phenomenological analysis of memory’s lived ex­perience, using Walter Benjamin’s concept of montage as radical remembering and its dialectical relation to history, I show how embodied memories shape their own space, a space not always framed by historical master narratives and identity posi­tions, but rather a searching space that is always changing. Dealing with the politics of place and representations, these memories are constantly loaded and unloaded with meaning. Yet the space of lived memory is not always a creation of meaning. Walking around, searching for traces, a memory space confronts the place and maps its own geography. It turns to a spatial and temporal flow, which intertwines place and experience, and erases the past and future as homogeneous categories. It is a living space of memory, rather than a memorial space of representations.

The analysis focuses further on the tensions between remembering as a dialogue with history and memory’s ongoing acts of embodied experience. The position of in-betweenness appears in these stories of escape, not as a state of in-between home and away, past and present, but rather as an ongoing space-making process be­tween different modes and layers of memory. This is a process aware of the constant changes in the understandings of both history and personal experiences, intertwin­ing these new interpretations with embodied memory and thereby constantly add­ing new layers of experience to it. Memory’s tracing illuminates a memory poetics of the meanwhile and the in-between, which refuses historical closure.

During the period c. 1720-1900 a large quantity of descriptions of rural areas in Sweden were set down on paper. Some 700 local descriptions were printed at the time or have appeared in print during the twentieth century. The most common geographical unit for local descriptions is the parish. As a rule the author was a public servant, and the clergy in particular were industrious local descriptive writers.

In part the aim of this thesis is to present the Swedish local description projects and local descriptive literature as a phenomenon of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A further aim is to investigate the way the folklife descriptions which come into most of the local descriptions are constituted for the period c. 1750-1850.

The local descriptions which form the main object of analysis and discussion in the thesis comprise contemporary delineations which came into being in order to achieve an economic-topographical description of the country, where agriculture and the individual economy of the common man were the focus of attention. These descriptions to a certain extent define the problems the authors associate with the economic life of the countryside and way of life of the population.

Local descriptions constitute a particular category of geographical delineation and have either come into being on the author's own initiative, in reply to a particular institution or the questionnaire of a particular person, or as an academic dissertation. The authors of local descriptions are in most cases connected with the area they describe. The work was mainly carried out by voluntary effort.

The idea of the need for a national and methodically organised inventorying of resources associated with the physical environment was the most important reason for undertaking local description projects. These Swedish local descriptions were one of several important cornerstones in the endeavours of the State to increase the population, income from taxes, and welfare in general. Local descriptions constituted materialised visions of optimism for growth, and a better and happier future for the country and its inhabitants, in the modern Sweden which was beginning to emerge in the mid-eighteenth century. Another overall aim was to improve the moral status of the peasantry and promote in them a moral and virtuous way of life. The enlightenment of the common man thereby became a didactic matter, touched on in many local descriptions. This process was not unique to Sweden; corresponding efforts took place in a whole host of other European countries.

The selection of sixty or so local descriptions studied in this thesis are characterised to a great extent by dualistic tendencies on the part of the public servants in their writings about, and interpretations of, peasant character and the state of the agricultural economy. Descriptions of the noble and exemplary true Swedish peasant faithful to his king, hospitable and honest are combined with descriptions of those same people's immodest consumption of spirits, lack of foresight, inclination to the "superstitious", and pernicious love of material things. In actual fact local descriptive writings consisted of an encounter: on the one side between more abstract and political discourses which contained thoughts of an ideal social organisation and the true nature of a population; while on the other side were the everyday experiences of separate writers vis a vis the qualities and situations of the local peasant population, compiled from their position as objectively observing public servants.

This thesis is about exploring the politics within and around research. The starting point is a European project which ran from late 1997 to the end of 2000. It was called "Self-employment activities concerning women and mi­norities: their success or failure in relation to social citizenship policies" and had as its objective to provide the EU-Commission with recommendations for improved self-employment policies. Background material was comple­mented by interviews with "experts", but the main source of information was in the form of biographical interviews with the self-employed, or for­merly self-employed, themselves. The qualitative method was used as a way of researching how individuals' background and experiences influenced their decision to become self-employed as well as their tendency to use labour market policies available for starting businesses. It was also a way to find out how those policies impacted on the individuals' lives. The conse­quent recommendations included a suggestion for broadening existing policies to comprise social aspects as well as financial allowances, and also the caution that self-employment was perhaps not the best solution to labour market and social exclusion.

This latter doubt arose during project work, as did questions about methodology, the role of the researcher, and eventually about the politics that inform research. Only briefly touched upon in the project reports, these issues instead became the basis for the thesis. A reflexive rereading of the Final Report led to a critical examination of the political uses of con­cepts and categories, of how stereotypes affect research, and of the embeddedness in ethnocentric discourses of both research and researcher. The use of postcolonial and feminist theory, discourse analysis and a social constructionist perspective broadened the analytical possibilities and fur­thered understanding of the connections between politics and research. A conclusion is that a comprehensive change in the social order as well as in people's conscience is required to stem ethnic discrimination in society and the perpetuation of stereotypes and preconstructed categories in research.

This thesis is about exploring the politics within and around research. The starting point is a European project which ran from late 1997 to the end of 2000. It was called "Self-employment activities concerning women and mi­norities: their success or failure in relation to social citizenship policies" and had as its objective to provide the EU-Commission with recommendations for improved self-employment policies. Background material was comple­mented by interviews with "experts", but the main source of information was in the form of biographical interviews with the self-employed, or for­merly self-employed, themselves. The qualitative method was used as a way of researching how individuals' background and experiences influenced their decision to become self-employed as well as their tendency to use labour market policies available for starting businesses. It was also a way to find out how those policies impacted on the individuals' lives. The conse­quent recommendations included a suggestion for broadening existing policies to comprise social aspects as well as financial allowances, and also the caution that self-employment was perhaps not the best solution to labour market and social exclusion.

This latter doubt arose during project work, as did questions about methodology, the role of the researcher, and eventually about the politics that inform research. Only briefly touched upon in the project reports, these issues instead became the basis for the thesis. A reflexive rereading of the Final Report led to a critical examination of the political uses of con­cepts and categories, of how stereotypes affect research, and of the embeddedness in ethnocentric discourses of both research and researcher. The use of postcolonial and feminist theory, discourse analysis and a social constructionist perspective broadened the analytical possibilities and fur­thered understanding of the connections between politics and research. A conclusion is that a comprehensive change in the social order as well as in people's conscience is required to stem ethnic discrimination in society and the perpetuation of stereotypes and preconstructed categories in research.

Differences in mortality among families give us clues about the importance of unobserved health-related behaviors. For example, if lower mortality was due to types of personal behavior learned in childhood, it should carry over to mortality at older ages. In this paper we use records from a nineteenth-century Belgian community to look at differences at mortality differences among families in two ways. First, we construct a direct measure of exposure to disease in childhood by counting the number of children in each family that died before age 15. Second, we calculate the overall effect of inter-family differences by using a "random effect" model that estimates the variance of the "family effect". Both of these measures show a strong family effect in childhood, but this effect diminishes after age 15 and disappears after age 55. Moreover, in a period still dominated by infectious diseases, those who survived diseases in childhood acquired immunities that helped them in later life.